China's birthrate dropping

ByMary-Louise O'CallaghanMarch 22, 1984

China's one-child population control policy is likely to squeeze the size of Chinese families even further and leave the next generation of Chinese without brothers and sisters.

Figures this week showed that Peking's birthrate has decreased in 1983 for the first time in six years, as the one-child policy is more stringently enforced.

The city's natural population growth dropped from 14.36 per thousand in 1982 to 10.14 per thousand last year, according to a report by the offical Chinese news agency, Xinhua. The report said that of all children born in Peking last year, more than 90 percent of them were only children. The capital, which already has a population of 9,230,678, plans to keep its population under 10 million until the end of the century.